Candidates vie for seat on state education board

AUSTIN – Amid several other competitive races on the March 1 ballot is a three-way Democratic Primary race for the Texas State Board of Education.

Two of the candidates say they want to restore funding and flexibility to traditional public schools, while the third has taken big bucks from a group that promotes publicly funded, privately operated charter schools.

The three are running to replace Martha Dominguez of El Paso, who was elected in 2012 to represent 38-county District 1.

The 15-member board has several important responsibilities. It sets curriculum standards, adopts textbooks, sets graduation standards and administers the Texas Permanent School Fund.

The board also has garnered its share of notoriety in recent years. It’s known for bitter battles, in which Democrats have accused Republicans of inserting partisan bias into textbooks and curriculum, while Republicans have said they were merely correcting liberal biases from the past.

In this election, East Texas candidate Mary Lou Bruner has been attracting national attention for her claims that global warming is a hoax intended to spread socialism, and that President Barack Obama worked as a male prostitute to support a supposed drug habit while he was in his 20s.

There haven’t been any such fireworks so far in the District 1 race, but a controversy has emerged. Questions have been raised about whether Fierro’s military status renders him ineligible for the seat he is seeking.

A Fort Bliss spokesman said the Army is investigating those claims. Fierro did not respond to several calls about that issue for this story.

Meanwhile, Perez says she’s firmly opposed to the policies of Fierro’s top contributor – Texans for Education Reform – which gave $15,000 in what is typically a low-dollar race.

“‘Reform’ is a code word for privatization,” said Perez, a 41-year-old former teacher who now runs a family business.

She was referring to Texans for Education Reform’s agenda to expand the number of charter schools. Critics such as Perez point out that the schools are run by nonprofit corporations even though they spend taxpayer dollars and that they aren’t subject to the same regulations as traditional public schools. Also, critics say, charter schools draw funds away from traditional public schools even though they haven’t been shown to work any better.

Oliver, a 73-year-old who spent 20 years teaching theater arts, agreed that charter schools are not helping public education in Texas.

“I’m very concerned about the education-reform, privatization movement,” she said. “We need to educate every kid – regardless of what their socioeconomic background is.”

She was not very familiar, however, with Texans for Education Reform, which also has contributed $100,000 to former Texas Rep. Chente Quintanilla’s effort to regain his old Lower Valley House seat.

“I’ve read some of their things, but I don’t know enough to have a judgment,” Oliver said.

After a career as a teacher, professional actor and theatrical agent, Oliver now teaches part time at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She said she was drawn to the State Board of Education race because of what she’s seen as a decline in the quality of Texas public schools.

“We were one of the models of the country,” Oliver said. “Now, we’re near the bottom.”

Both she and Perez were critical of what they see as Texas’ over-reliance on standardized testing to evaluate students and schools. Both said it has taken the joy out of education without improving outcomes.

And Perez said she was working in the Ysleta Independent School District in 2011 when the Republican-controlled Legislature dealt a massive blow to school funding.

“After the $5.4 billion in cuts, a lot of necessary programs were eliminated,” she said. “At the same time, a lot of the high-stakes tests went on steroids.”

Perez said that as an eighth-grade teacher, she could see the harm. In a three-week period, students had to pass 21 assessments to move on to high school.

“It was a huge factor in dropouts,” she said. “I think the schools should be accountable. I think they should be accountable to the students.”